The Whiskey Rebellion Series

On Christmas morning, 1794, twenty thousand Philadelphians mobbed the broad, cobbled streets of their city to see the defeated whiskey rebels brought in from the west. If the people were expecting a big show, they had reason to be disappointed. There were twenty prisoners, and General Blackbeard White himself had been given the job of escorting them from the Forks. Already skinny, pale, and exhausted by questioning and imprisonment when leaving Fort Fayette on November 25, they’d spent a month crossing mountains forbidding enough in summer, locked now in winter. Each prisoner had walked. General White ordered the beheading of anyone attempting escape: heads, he’s announced hopefully, would be displayed in the city. Only twelve cases went to trial, and in the end only two rebels were convicted. With the crisis over, Washington pardoned the condemned men.

In Washington’s stated opinion, suppressing the Whiskey Rebellion had drawn from the American people the support for law and government that marked their highest character. Washington also noted that the operation worked out well for him personally. With commercial distilling newly profitable, he added whiskey making to his endeavors at Mount Vernon.

Yet the whiskey tax remained hard to collect. There were occasional disruptions of court proceedings and occasional threats, but mainly there was sneakiness and recalcitrance, smuggling and moonshining. The authority that established itself at last in the western country was not challenged. It was eluded.

In the election of 1800, the Jeffersonians came to power and the whiskey tax was repealed.

The Whiskey Rebellion Series

The whole population had been defined as insurgent. The very presence of federal troops made the Forks a kind of battlefield. Rules for capturing and interrogating prisoners of war weren’t governed by the Bill of Rights. By the time the army began making mass arrests at the Forks, it seemed to Forks moderates that more than two thousand men had fled the area; almost anybody who had committed an act of terror, and wasn’t within amnesty, had gone down the Ohio or into the countryside.

Hundreds of Forks residents, within and without amnesty, were yanked from bed at bayonet point in the cold. Foot soldiers prodded the startled prisoners, close to naked and some barefoot, out of cabins  into new-fallen snow while mounted officers barked commands and told furious wives and crying children that the men were being taken to be hanged. All were run through the snow in chains, toward various lockups in town jails, stables, and cattle pens, to await interrogation.

General Anthony “Blackbeard” White, of the New Jersey militia, was well known for mental instability. For more than two days, White starved and dehydrated his shivering, exhausted captives, steadily cursing and castigating them, glorying in their helplessness and describing their imminent hanging. He quick-marched them twelve miles through bad weather to the town of Washington, where in physical and emotional collapse, they were held in jail, without charge, ready for questioning by the military.

In the days after the Dreadful Night, mass arrests went on anyway: the brutality of the arrests and the torment of detention served the purpose of discouraging citizens of the Forks – and everywhere else – not only from engaging in resistance but also from forming societies and organizations.

The Whiskey Rebellion Series

The citizen army that Washington and Hamilton were moving west had two classes. Officers came from the ranks of the creditor aristocracy in the seaboard cities. The men these cavaliers were commanding were mainly militia draftees. Because better-off draftees hired substitutes to serve in their places, the ranks were crowded with the poorest laborers and landless workers, recent immigrants and subsistence farmers.

The draftees had no uniforms. Their clothing couldn’t keep out autumn dampness and chill. To Hamilton’s frustration, the supply process was chronically sluggish, and desperately needed tents, overalls, and jackets, even blankets, were scarce. The men slept in cold fields, sometimes in tents but always on the ground, usually without straw for insulation. Drinking water could be bad, food paltry. Officers stayed in warm taverns and homes, where they spent their plentiful coin on extra food and drink. At times they were lavishly fed and entertained by hosts who could proffer fine wines and the charms of piano-playing daughters. Out in the camps, men drank whiskey and fired newly issued muskets for fun. Drunk on wine in brick houses, officers didn’t focus on orders not to waste powder.

Mornings began with floggings. Draft evasion had been rampant, with militiamen simply running and hiding. Once pressed into service, men deserted incorrigibly, embarrassing state governors and undermining the mission’s political spin: this was supposed to be a patriotic citizen army, reporting eagerly for duty to suppress ambitious traitors.

Foot soldiers felt resentment for the mission and had hopes mainly for plunder. They were all hungry and cold. While families cowered in farmhouses, freelancing soldiers crashed drunk through fields of just-ripened crops, tearing down fences for firewood, slaughtering chickens and pigs, buildings fires, and sleeping where they fell.

This army seemed thirstier for blood, more intent on murder, less disciplined. Rebel militias had been trying to take over the legitimate government. These soldiers were even more frightening: they were the legitimate government.

The Whiskey Rebellion Series

The Militia Law Act, as well as certain parts of the Constitution itself, had been constructed for the very purpose of allowing troops to police citizens. The militia could “enforce the law,” “cause the laws to be duly executed,” and “suppress combinations,” all of which must mean, Hamilton said, that the militia can also break up meetings and assemblies that exist simply for the purpose of noncompliance with the law, when such meetings are supported by violence that baffles ordinary law enforcement.

The federal commissioners threatened the entry of troops into the Forks area and implied strongly that military incursion could be avoided it total submission were demonstrated by all people in the region. Repeal of the excise tax law was out of the question. Members of the entire Parkinson’s Ferry committee of sixty must unanimously declare their determination to submit to the laws of the United States and to refrain from obstructing the operation of the excise law. Two-fifths of the Parkinson’s Ferry committee preferred civil war.

The fate of males eighteen and older would depend on their signing, on September 11, and not a day later, an oath of submission to federal law. Those who signed on time, did not resist the troops in any way, and complied with the law in the future could count on an amnesty for past crimes. Anyone else, regardless of anything he’d done or not done during the insurgency, would be fair game for arrest by the troops.

The federal marshal for Pennsylvania was sent to serve summons to the people on the list. The writs required defendants to appear in court in August; courts were closed then. The rebels moved instantly to shut down all tax offices and punish not only officials but also civilian collaborators. Under the Militia Act, the president of the United States was now empowered to call out an army against them. And with Congress in recess, the president would be empowered by the new militia law to call out the largest possible force on his own discretion. 

Hamilton and Knox were arguing for moving immediately, with an overwhelming force of at least twelve thousand men, bigger than any American army to date, more than had beaten the British at Yorktown. The question of delay was somewhat academic anyway: Troops would need time to mobilize. Negotiations would meanwhile fail, revealing rebels as intractable.

Eastern newspapers railed against the insurgency; the officer classes in city militias were gung ho to march for glory. The seaboard cities filled with patriotic fervor, expressed hatred for the rebels, and wondered why the president hadn’t already moved against them. The troops could now move with impunity.

Hamilton began ordering arms and supplies and sending work to Henry Lee of Virginia, who would serve under Washington as commander of the whole force. Troops from New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia began marching west. On September 30, Washington and Hamilton stepped into a presidential coach and rode together down Market Street, leaving Philadelphia to join the army at Carlisle. Washington had always excelled at military administration, and Hamilton was enjoying a new one as secretary of war.

The Whiskey Rebellion Series

Washington felt he knew the Forks well. He’d been getting immensely frustrated with the major project of his life, western land speculation. In five decades, that speculation had given him a total of sixty thousand acres across the Appalachians. He’d deployed land scouts with instructions to break and get around laws limiting tract size. He’d threatened and bullied people who were eyeballing plots to which, by virtue of having eyeballed them first, he claimed title. When the royal proclamation of 1763 prohibited land purchases west of the mountains, he told his agent to buy there anyway. The War of Independence legitimized his titles by overturning royal injunctions. After the revolution, he showed no patience for illegal possession: he spent much energy bringing actions against squatters, disdaining their idea that title – or at least affordable rents – should be offered to those willing to live on and improve the land.

He needed full rent. He had a constant need for cash. Making Mount Vernon pay for itself was always a problem, and his late mother had been a carping, ungrateful drain on his slim cash resources. He’d hoped to gain solvency through collections of western rents and then – when canals and roads were supported by the government and built by his own company, when Indians were suppressed by the United States Army, when regional government became what he called well toned – make a fortune by selling those lands.

But his hopes for the west were growing dreary, his patience thin. The land was still squatted on; rents were uncollected The absence of cash in the west was well known to Washington: he had to accept grain and other barter as rent, which always sold, through his agents in the west, for less than he knew it was worth.

The whole problem was becoming encapsulated for Washington in the western people’s resistance to the tax law, which hadn’t been enforced anywhere over the mountains, from Kentucky to the Northwest Territory. Failure to collect a national tax imposed an embarrassing limit on the national reach. Tax resistance weakened big creditors’ confidence in the financial stability of the United States, which had promised to pay bondholders interest derived from excise revenues. To make up the shortfall, Hamilton had been forced to propose new federal taxes: excises on snuff, sugar, and carriages, as well as stamp taxes and new import duties. Because such taxes shifted burdens back to eastern merchants and creditors, now even federalists were worried about excessive taxation.

The western land bubble would soon burst for everybody if lands appeared not to be under effective control of the United States.

The Whiskey Rebellion Series

Even as Alexander Hamilton began considering ways of bringing a federal army presence to the Forks of the Ohio, five hundred men calling themselves the Mingo Creek Association emerged as a power at the Forks. The association had a long ancestry. Men who became members and allies of the association had, in the years leading to ratification of the U.S. Constitution, closed roads to towns where debt cases were heard and foreclosed property was auctioned; they’d enforce boycotts on liquor brought in from the east, they’d condemned tax collectors, and they’d corresponded with Virginians and Kentuckians of the need for western unity.

When word spread that a deputy was trying serve papers in the Johnson case, the tax collector encountered a gang that took him into the woods and began by using a horsewhip on him. His naked body, stripes new and raw, received the blistering tar. He was stuck with feathers, tied up, and left in the woods in agony, his horse, money, and warrants seized.

Now the association set goals far broader than attacks on collectors. It planned to unite the four western counties, and the whole trans-Appalachian west into armed opposition to eastern oppression. Conveniently for the association’s plans, the sanctioned state militias, which organized and armed all able-bodied adult white males, was subject to extreme degrees of popular democracy.

From Colonels down, officers were elected by the militiamen themselves, including by landless men and dependents in others’ households. Anyone possessed of charisma and effectiveness, even if lacking gorgeous uniforms, proud mounts, gleaming arms, or money, could rise in the militia system.

The association took an even more radical step. The revised, conservative state constitution had ended popular elections for local judges. The governor appointed judges. Creditors had been finding debt cases easier to bring and win. No citizen in the militia’s district, the association announced, was to bring suit in county court against any other citizen in the district without first applying to the association for what it presented as mediation. Mediators would be chosen by popular elections, held outside sanctioned political process.

Not surprisingly, given the association’s identity with the local militia, and the assaults for which it was becoming known, lawsuits for debt collection in the county court dropped off sharply. Going to law to collect debts or bring foreclosures suddenly took courage, even foolhardiness.

By May 1794, liberty poles were rising. Up to a hundred feet tall, these were symbols made most famously in Boston. The appearance of liberty poles in the western country thus had a meaning that was clear to everyone. Rebellion against tyranny was under way.

The western country had its own flag now too. Six stripes, alternating red and white, stood for the unified six counties of western Pennsylvania and northwestern Virginia. The people saw the whiskey tax only as a symbol. They wanted repeal, but they were also talking about a redistribution of wealth, especially of land, with rules for access to land and rewards for improvement.

Mingo Creek Militia – Colonel John Hamilton

Herman Husband – Philosopher of the Allegheny

The Whiskey Rebellion Series

Whiskey came in vogue early in the eighteenth century with the influx of Scots-Irish settlers, who brought expertise in domestic distilling. The Scots-Irish were notably tough descendants of Protestant Scots peasantry, who had resettled in Ulster and then been forced, by exorbitant rents and English taxes, to migrate to North America. By the time of the revolution, domestic whiskey was gaining popularity and would replace rum as the country’s drink.

Eighteenth-century Americans distilled whiskey just as their ancestors had, using a pot still. The good product was clear. Inhaling it would water the eyes and rustle nose hairs. Swallowed, it made a hard impact, then a glowing heat; in the end, the feeling was surprisingly smooth, and soon after recovery, another shot might seem to be in order. Barrel storage darkened the drink and brought out redolent grain, woodsmoke, sugar. Drunken raw or aging, whiskey abruptly makes the drinker and the world different.

Many small farmers distilled seasonally. Whiskey was consumed by men, women, and children at all times of the day and every sort of gathering muster, church, election, work, dance, and fight. Often a community distiller kept pot stills going through the harvest, and farmers brought in their grain and took away the whiskey, paying the distiller in a portion of product.

The best whiskey was known to come from the Forks of the Ohio, whose “Monongahela rye” possessed consistent strength and purity. The region achieved brand recognition. Its whiskey was known by name in Philadelphia and in New Orleans. More than a fourth of the stills in America were located at the Forks of the Ohio.

Whiskey became currency in places where coin wasn’t seen. Barter paralyzed local economies, but whiskey was a true medium, always exchangeable for cash somewhere down the line, thus maintaining value against metal. A liquid commodity both literally and figuratively, the drink democratized local economies, offering even tenants and sharecroppers laborers a benefit. Tenants often wanted to pay rent, and laborers often got paid, in a portion of the grain they harvested. Community stills transformed, for a cut, such cumbersome forms of payment into something fungible. And while landlords often refused in-kind crops, or demanded them in extravagant quantities, they’d take whiskey for rent.

The Whiskey Rebellion Series

Hamilton’s goal for the domestic debt remained making reliable payments to creditors and inspiring confidence in federal bonds as articles of investment and trade. Funding the debt would spring-feed a pool of capital, from which the federal government could draw and draw again, in nurturing a growing nation. Wealth would be concentrated in the hands of moneyed investors. Their ambitions would fund the nation’s ambitions.

In January of 1790, Hamilton filed his proposed plan, the Report on Public Credit. The report urged a three-part program: paying interest on, rather than paying off or voiding, the federal domestic debt; hugely expanding that debt by absorbing all the states’ debts; and raising revenues for interest payments on the expanded debt by adding to the customs laws new duties on imported wine and spirits, and imposing an excise tax on domestically distilled spirits.

The product Hamilton proposed to tax, distilled spirits, was not, he said, a necessity but a luxury item consumed by those who could afford to pay the tax. Throughout debate, his allies had invited the House to see a whiskey tax as a public-health effort. Hamilton presented a letter for the Philadelphia College of Physicians, who said that domestic distilled spirits, the cheap drink of the laboring classes, had become a ravaging plague requiring immediate treatment. It was easy to see a federal excise tax on whiskey as an innocuous luxury tax, easily passed on by distillers to drinkers, surely nothing to tar and feather anyone over.

This law would be a good thing for the country, Hamilton told Congress, because it made collection of public revenue dependent not on the goodwill of the taxed, as state revenue laws always had, but on the vigilance of federal officers. The people’s movement had always made itself arbiter of whether taxes could be collected. States hadn’t been lazy, Hamilton said, or weak; they’d been scared. Federal officers, he promised, wouldn’t be. This tax would be collected everywhere. The means to use force existed.

March of 1791, the Whiskey Tax became law. The tax redistributed wealth by working itself deeply into rural people’s peculiar economic relationship with whiskey. Many of Hamilton’s congressional opponents wouldn’t have understood that relationship. Hamilton did.

Alexander Hamilton knew that in getting the act passed was a very smart bomb on a target he’d been softening for years. The secretary of treasury was celebrating a victory, which some at the Forks had every intention of cutting short, in a long struggle over nothing les than the power of money in the lives of the American people.

Passed by the first Congress of the United States in March 1791 heralded the first federal tax on an American product.